


don't want to keep secrets (just to keep you)

by cosmicwritings



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 16:22:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20392624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicwritings/pseuds/cosmicwritings
Summary: "“I don’t want people to know, either. For this to become a huge thing.” She means she wants one thing to herself. Her personal life has always been the town’s favourite movie to watch."or they spend all summer saying they don't want a relationship and fall in love anyway.





	don't want to keep secrets (just to keep you)

**Author's Note:**

> au, inspired by the song cruel summer by taylor swift ! non canon-compliant, and if you ask me to explain the timeline here in accordance to the show, i really could not tell you – just know it’s during summer and probably season 2-3 somewhere, they're both seventeen in this. i wrote this entire thing in one (1) day, meaning i haven't sat down and read thru it properly and edited it or whatever. it's literally just a dump of my feelings about them and did i project some of my own real life issues and thoughts into this? yes but i'm valid. actually this is entirely written to dump my real life stuff into some writing but Whatever i love them, teenagers being young & stupid is literally My Brand
> 
> title from cruel summer by taylor swift ! lover is one of the best albums bye

“I have a boyfriend. I love Dean. I _love_ him.”

“Do you?” he says, eyebrows raised. It’s in a casual voice that’s not really casual at all. Not accusatory. Not demanding. Just as if asking if it’s _really_ raining outside. He doesn’t believe her and, if she’s being honest, she doesn’t either.

“_Yes_,” but the word is spat out, like venom, trying to hurt him and make him recoil. He does not. She doesn’t know why she wants him to be wounded by it at all.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

* * *

She breaks up with Dean a week later. It’s the last day of school before it’s finished for the summer, so at least she doesn’t have to see him every day anymore.

* * *

The thing about Jess Mariano is that the entire town thinks it’s inevitable that she’s going to be infatuated with his dark eyes and dangerous smirk, which is actually mildly just a little offensive. She is Stars Hollow’s golden girl, and they still don’t have the faith in her at all to not be young and seventeen and silly.

They’re right, but they _shouldn’t_ be.

But the idea that he’s anything like a bad boy at all almost makes her laugh. He carries paperbacks in his back pocket and writes notes of his own thoughts in the margins. He name-drops fictional characters in casual conversation. When she turns up at his door (carefully checking that Luke is preoccupied with the diner downstairs) to tell him what she wants, he stumbles.

“I don’t want a relationship,” she says first, because it’s the truth. Dean was supposed to be the perfect boyfriend, and she hated it – the overbearingness, the pressure, the way he expected something from her.

“Okay.”

“I don’t want people to know, either. For this to become a huge thing.” She means she wants one thing to herself. Her personal life has always been the town’s favourite movie to watch.

“What _do_ you want, then?” Because he’s recovered now, he’s back to teasing her. It’s almost challenging, with his head cocked to one side.

She would like to put on the record that she does think about it. She’s always thought about things before it happens, because she overthinks and she over plans, and everyone wants her to be perfect so she’s always trying to be _careful_. But she’s thought about it before she marched her way over here, so she stares at him for a moment and then grabs onto the front of his hoodie so she can kiss him.

* * *

The first time she wakes up in his bed, curled into his bare chest and listening to his beating heart, she says, “I’m serious. I don’t want a relationship.”

“I heard you,” he says, amused. His hand does not stop stroking up the curve of her spine and she shivers.

“I broke up with Dean, by the way.”

“I know, it’s the talk of the town.” He shifts. “Rory, I wasn’t going to do this with you if you were with someone else.”

“I know,” she echoes, and she finds that when she says it, she believes it.

They lapse into silence.

She pulls back slightly away from him, but only so she can look into his face. He looks different like this, softer and more malleable, hair dishevelled and jaw unclenched. Just the two of them. “If we date right now, it’d be a disaster.”

The words come out blunter than she’s going for, so for a moment, she’s afraid she might offend him, but his lips pull upwards as he chuckles. “God, ain’t that fucking right.”

“Sorry,” because mostly she’s thinking about how this town is obsessed with her life. They hated Jess because he was Jess, because he wrecked their view on the all-American good life. That was fair. They hated him even more because he broke Rory’s arm and wouldn’t stop talking to her after they all gave him dirty looks. They think Rory broke up with Dean on a whim, because Jess was always looking at her and she couldn’t help herself.

“Shut up, Gilmore,” he scoffs. They hated him because he was Jess, and that’s maybe one of the more important reasons.

“I didn’t like having a boyfriend,” she admits. She always thought she’d be the kind of girl who liked having a boyfriend, not sleeping with a boy in secret.

She thinks he might make a quip about Dean, but he doesn’t and she’s thankful. “Okay.”

“There’s too much pressure on everything,” she explains. “For me to be the right girlfriend. To say _I love you_ at the right time. And I’m concentrating on getting into Harvard, I don’t have time to – you know. Make sure I’m doing the girlfriend thing right, too.”

He nods, and she watches the curve of his jaw. “As luck has it, I’m not a good boyfriend.”

The only reason she doesn’t argue is because she doesn’t _know_ what he’s like as a boyfriend. “Okay.”

“What a pair we fucking make,” he says, and she can’t believe she _laughs_.

She rests a hand on his collarbone, tracing the line.

He says, “Rory, I’m not going to lie to you. You know that I like you.”

She knows. She says, “I _really_ like you.”

“For this – thing, we can just be us,” he says, and it’s the best offer she’s ever heard.

* * *

No one knows until three weeks in, when Lorelai comes home early and Rory doesn’t hear it because she’s lying on her bed, distracted by Jess’ mouth on her neck and his hands on her skin.

Lorelai Gilmore makes noise wherever she goes, like a storm that doesn’t know how not to be, so Rory doesn’t hear the front door open and close, but she hears her mother yelp when she walks into the couch by accident, screaming, “Fuck! Fuck, shit, my _toe_!”

Jess freezes above her, and then Rory sits up, pushing him off. She’s a split-second from telling him to _hide_, which in hindsight is both ridiculous and childish, but the first-aid kit has been kept in her bedroom ever since Lorelai tried to bandage up herself four years ago when she was at school, and she’d come home to a huge mess.

When Lorelai barges into what she thinks will be Rory’s empty room, Jess is still on her bed and the only thing Rory has managed to do is pull the bottom of her shirt back down so any skin that was showing is covered. She doesn’t have time to pull the collar of her shirt back _up_, though, and there’s a bright red spot where her collarbone is.

“What the _fuck_?” is what falls out of Lorelai’s mouth, which really gives Rory an indication of her mother’s feelings because Lorelai swears a lot in front of Rory by accident, but never _at_ her.

She’s staring, bug-eyed, at Jess, who doesn’t say anything. Rory prods his shoulder and he stands, ducking out of the room without looking at Lorelai. The front door closes less than two seconds later.

“You said you wouldn’t be home today because you’d be hanging out with Lane,” her mother says, eyebrows knitted together.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“Lying,” she replies, no hesitation.

“You’re dating _Jess_?”

“No, I’m _seeing_ Jess.”

Lorelai’s eyes focus on the hickey, so Rory pulls up her collar self-consciously. “What do you mean seeing?”

“I mean, I’m seeing Jess,” she says, arms folded. She won’t back down from this.

“Rory, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

She bites back any retort that comes crawling up her throat. Lorelai Gilmore has gone through her fair share of bad ideas as a teenager. She’s the product of one. “Okay.”

“What about Dean?”

“I broke up with Dean, you know that.”

“Isn’t this a bit fast?”

There’s a terrible, terrible moment where she’s about to say that she’s not hung up on Dean, not the way that everyone’s expecting. The way she was expecting, if she’s honest, but mostly she feels relieved because she felt like she was suffocating in that relationship. But she can’t say that to her mother, who’s looking at her like she doesn’t know her. She says, “Maybe.”

“_Jess_?”

“I like him,” she says and does not elaborate.

“I’m just worried, Rory,” Lorelai says, and Rory softens a little. This is not a fight with the town, not a defence presentation on why she has full control of her own decisions. This is her mother, who has made mistakes and wants to make sure her daughter doesn’t regret anything either.

“I’m not dating Jess,” she reassures. She moves off the bed to grab the first-aid kit to hand over, stubbed toe forgotten in this chaos. “I don’t want a relationship, Mom. I just really like him.”

* * *

There’s a tap on her window late at night and, when she goes to open the curtain, she sees him standing there, hands in his pockets.

“What’re you doing?”

“Want to come for a walk?” he says.

She considers him for a moment, only lit up by the light from her room in the darkness. “Yeah, sure thing, Romeo.”

* * *

Sometimes, they go to the lake because no one is ever there, and just sit and read together in silence. They recommend each other books and pass them back and forward; if she reads a line she really likes, she’ll make him look up so she can tell him. He writes in every book she lends him, which she thought she’d hate because she’s a book snob at heart, but she also really likes seeing his thoughts on the paper like this.

Other times, she’ll tell Luke that she’s going upstairs to help Jess study, and then end up with her back pressed against the couch as he looms over her. Kissing Jess is a lot different than kissing Dean, even though she knows she shouldn’t be comparing them at all. Jess makes her feel hungry for more, in a way she’s never felt before. She kisses him and she doesn’t want to ever stop. She kisses him and she wants to spend forever exploring the inside of his mouth and every way to make him groan.

Kissing Dean was something familiar, something she had gotten used to. She didn’t realise how much she’d enjoy finding new things about Jess like this. He likes when her nails dig into the back of his scalp. He likes her hand on his chest. The first time she grinds down on him involuntarily, he flips them over so he can kiss her deeper.

He doesn’t touch her like she’s delicate, and she’s thankful for it.

The first time they’ve both stripped off their shirts, she ends up laughing, even though nothing is really funny. Mostly, she’s embarrassed because the lights are off, but the sun is peeking through a gap in the curtains. The only people who’s ever seen her topless are her mom and the doctor and Dean. She’s fighting this instinct to shy away, but Jess kisses her shoulder, trails his fingers down the side of her arm. He’s blinking at her, like she’s his new favourite book, and shivers when she runs her hand down his chest and against his stomach. She’s still laughing a little, and it makes him laugh too, and suddenly it’s all right, because they’re just seventeen and silly, and it’s nice, more human, to know they’re still awkward and young and worried about these sorts of things. When his hands touch her waist, she’s no longer thinking about the sliver of light that shines against her skin, only that she really, _really_ wants him to kiss her again. His laughter tastes delicious sweet in her mouth.

When she presses her hand to his forearm, topless and shorts kicked off, she tells him it’s not her first time, but to be careful anyway. She’s only done this with Dean a few times and each time had _hurt_. He kisses her, softer than normal, so when she feels him, she lets her head drop back and he trails his mouth down her neck instead.

The thing is. The thing is that she likes studying and knowing things, so she likes watching the different touches that make him lose his cool. Familiarity paves the way for confidence as days roll into weeks roll into months. She learns how far she can push him before he pushes back, that he won’t make much noise, but he likes it when she does. Rory won’t do things unless she knows she can do them perfectly, a bad habit from childhood that she’s still learning to break, but she doesn’t realise how much she likes the process of breaking Jess’ walls down until now.

* * *

She tells Lane because she tells Lane almost everything and, also, Lane doesn’t hate him as much as the rest of the town does.

“I live vicariously through you,” is the first thing Lane says when Rory tells her. They’re sitting cross-legged on Rory’s bed, painting their toe nails.

Rory doesn’t answer, her tongue stuck out in concentration as she focuses on her baby toe.

“Is it good?”

“it’s amazing,” Rory says, but she doesn’t really know how to answer that question. She finishes the toe and straightens up, eyeing her best friend up. “Aren’t you going to lecture me? Tell me it’s a bad idea?”

“Why? Because it’s Jess or because of Dean or because of what you’re doing?”

“Because of everything,” she says, sitting back. “That’s what my mom did.”

“Your mom’s badass and he probably reminds her too much of every boy in a leather jacket from her teenage days,” Lane says, and she’s not _wrong_. “I thought you said you really like him.”

“I do.”

“Then, I’m just going to tell you to be careful with your heart, not lecture you.” Lane rolls her eyes. Rory feels a rush of affection for her best friend. “You’re being careful, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t mean about sex.” Lane pauses, then says, “I mean, I do. I’m glad you’re being careful about that. But I mean, he knows you don’t want a relationship, right? Like what are the rules here?”

“There aren’t any rules,” Rory replies. “Neither of us want a relationship. That’s the rules.”

“No rules doesn’t sound very smart.”

“You weren’t going to lecture me.”

“I’m not lecturing!” Lane reassures. “Just speaking aloud. Don’t listen to me. I’m only allowed to talk to boys whilst in school, where my mom isn’t looking.”

“We’re just – being us, at the moment,” Rory says, and it sounds lamer when she says it out loud, here.

“Love you, Rory,” Lane says seriously. “You know I’ll be here to pick up any bits of a broken heart.”

Lane is the _best_.

* * *

She knows that no one in this town really trusts his driving after the car accident where she broke her arm, but no one in this town has been in the car with him either. She likes being in the car with him because she likes being in the passenger seat, the best place to look at him without him looking at her back.

He picks her up once the diner closes and he’s finished working, both undercover in the dark. Lorelai knows now, but she won’t ask questions because she doesn’t want to talk about it. When Rory says she’ll be back later, her mother tells her to be careful and then pretends she’s not peeking out the window to see Jess waiting in his car.

“Where are we going?” she says when she drops into the passenger seat.

“Nowhere,” he says, and then he drives.

Mostly, they circle just outside the town, because they don’t want to tempt fate to have anyone recognise them. They’re still trying to be just them.

He talks more during the night time, she notices. During the day, he’ll remain tight-lipped and surly, but she can coax more out of him when they’re driving in the night like this.

When she asks him about school, he gives her a sideways look. “School’s your thing, not mine.”

She opens her mouth, about to disagree. Then, she closes it. It’s a tough concept to understand, because school has always been her number one priority, she’s not sure who she’d be without it.

“How’s progress to Harvard going?” he says, like he knows that she’s struggling, so she talks about that instead.

It’s a good topic change, giving her an easy way out, but she goes back to it once she’s done because she can’t leave things alone. She says. “Okay. I want you to explain it to me.”

“Yeah?”

“About your connection with education. I want to understand.” _I want to understand you_, she almost says, but that’s a little too on-the-nose. He’s not her boyfriend.

“I don’t care about school,” he says, and she bites her tongue to stop herself from saying _I know_. She wants to understand. “It’s, like, they’ve never done anything for me. I don’t – These tests and pop quizzes are all bullshit. They don’t teach us anything.”

“You read the same books we study for fun,” she says.

“Yeah. But I’m not making up bullshit that a teacher wants to hear to put into an essay for a grade.” He taps the steering wheel. “And I know you like school, that’s. That’s whatever. I can see _why_ you enjoy it. But you want to go to Harvard and want to learn some more. I want to be _done_ with all of this.”

She bites her lip, thinking. “What do you want to do after you graduate?”

He glances at her, and then back at the road. “I don’t know.”

“You could do really great things, with a degree or not, you know.”

“I was wondering how long it’d take before you got out the pom-poms again,” he says, and grins when she frowns. “It’s all right, Rory. I’ll figure it out.”

They’re seventeen and driving around in circles, going nowhere, because they want to spend time together. They’re seventeen and she should be at home, reading so she can get into Harvard, but there’s nothing she wants to do more than sit here forever.

He flicks his gaze towards her, and something in her stomach bottoms out.

She thinks she might have fallen in love with him, which is the opposite of how this should’ve gone when she turned up at his door. For a second, his eyes hold hers, and she thinks he must feel it, the way her heart stutters to a stop. But then he looks out at the road again. She breathes.

Here’s a shovel and some dirt. She’s going to bury this love somewhere deep, because if she tells him, it might ruin everything.

* * *

“Rory, are you home?” her mother says, when she opens the door numbly.

She really is about to say, “Yeah,” but the words don’t come out and gets clogged somewhere in her throat. She tries to swallow the lump in her throat.

“Rory?” Lorelai says again, and then she’s clattering towards the hallway, where her daughter is just rooted to the spot, coat still in her hand. “Are you okay?”

She takes a wobbly step forward, and then collapses into her mother’s open arms. “Mom.”

“Baby, what’s going on?”

“Mom, I think I’m in love with him,” she says, voice wet and muffled against her mother’s shirt. Saying it out loud makes it sound more real, and she closes her eyes.

“Oh, honey.”

She didn’t want a boyfriend, because she had one and she hated it. The thing about Dean was that maybe she did love him, in that way you do at fifteen, wide-eyed around a boy who’s tall and calls on the days he says he’s going to call. If she was going to have a boyfriend, Dean was supposed to be the perfect kind. Stars Hollow approved of it.

Dean made her want to kiss him with her mouth closed. He made her want to smile in her bed before she went to sleep and write diary entries about how he held the door open for her and told her he loved her like he meant it. Mostly, when she thinks about him, she thinks about how he wanted to be around her all the time. How he flipped when she couldn’t say _I love you_ back. How she stopped reading so much around him because he’d get restless and had to stop talking to her friends that were guys because Dean bristled every time she mentioned them and felt like snapping at him once a day because sometimes she wanted to be alone, but never did because she was trying to be the perfect girlfriend.

Stars Hollow approved of Dean and they didn’t approve of Jess, and that’s not a good reason to not date Jess. It’s not a good reason at all, but Rory’s always felt like she has something to live up to. If she wasn’t going to be perfect, she didn’t want to do it at all.

She told Jess she didn’t want to date him and it was the truth, at the time.

And then she fell in love with him, so this one’s kind of on her.

“I wasn’t going to fall in love with him,” she says to her mother, because she feels the need to justify herself.

“I know, honey,” Lorelai says, leaning her head against hers. “Sometimes, people creep up on you like that.”

* * *

They’re sitting by the lake, letting their legs dangle over the edge above the water. In between them, there’s half a bottle of vodka with some orange juice mixed in.

She wonders how she has gone these seventeen years of her life without having more than a glass of champagne her grandmother gives at fancy dinner parties. When she asks him where he bought the bottle, he tells her he has a fake ID and she’s not surprised.

“What does rebellion finally taste like for you?” he teases, when she picks up the bottle again to take a sip from.

She sticks her tongue out at him, handing over the bottle. “How you taste like when I only have twenty minutes in your room before Luke comes in.”

He laughs, and she pretends she doesn’t want to sit there and listen to the sound forever. “You’re a natural poet, Gilmore.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I think you’re pretty when you wear your hair like that,” he says, no hesitation, and it startles her so much that she nearly falls into the lake. He raises the bottle to his mouth and takes a larger pull from it than she did.

She raises her hand to touch the end of her newly cut hair. She didn’t cut that much off, just a summer trim, but she’s wearing it down, no clips, no hair tie, no headband. “Oh.”

“I mean, I think you’re pretty all the time,” he corrects, but he seems embarrassed now. He ducks his head, a hand scratching the back of his neck as he slides back the bottle with the other.

“Thank you,” she says, at a loss for words. She takes the bottle back and drinks, mostly because she doesn’t know what else to do. When she turns to look at him, her lips still wrapped around the lip of the bottle, he’s staring into the water below.

She doesn’t know why she suddenly feels, like, five seconds from crying, but there’s definitely something trapped the tear ducts in her eyes. She swallows, takes one more sip and then sets the bottle back on the ground in between them with shaky hands.

He looks really beautiful like this, she decides. Shoulders hunched over just a little, a muscle in his jaw ticking for no reason. The vodka orange juice doesn’t taste good, but it also doesn’t taste as bad as she thought, so when he picks it up to press against his lips, all she’s really thinking about is his mouth.

She’s in love with him, and it sort of puts a film on everything. A pretty, loved-up kind of film that blurs everything except for him. She watches his throat bob as he drinks and cannot explain the feeling she’s getting.

“Rory, are you okay?” And it sounds different to other times he asks, when he’s just checking up on her. He looks at her. He looks at her and she can see the worry in his face.

She could tell him now, she thinks, because the alcohol has muddled things in her mind by now.

Instead, she swallows again and says, “I’m fine.”

“Did you drink too much?”

“No,” she says, when she means _yes_, because that must be why she feels like ripping her heart out of her chest and putting it on the ground in front of him.

“Maybe you’ve had enough,” he says.

“Shut up,” she says, reaching for the bottle, and he lets her. He’s never been her keeper. He’s never stopped her from doing what she wants, because he knows it’s up to her.

“Be careful, then,” he says instead, because he still worries, even if he won’t admit it.

She finishes it off because it’s a lot easier to do so than think about the way he is looking at her and the shaking of her hands. He takes the empty bottle from her and stands up. She stands up with him, too quickly, and blinks a few times at the dizziness.

“Where are you going?”

“There’s a bin there, I’ll be back in a moment,” he says, and starts to walk away.

“Jess!” she says quietly, and then stops. His name tastes pretty in her mouth, but mostly just comes out slurred.

He doesn’t hear her, though.

“Jess!” she shouts this time, louder, and he spins around to look at her, surprised. “Fuck. Fuck! Okay, fuck, I’m in love with you. And I’m not sorry for feeling it, but I am sorry for fucking all of this. And fucking it all up now.”

She has never cursed so much in her life. Really, she feels like she’s coming apart, edges blurred out by the alcohol, but mostly because of all her feelings. She doesn’t want to lie to him about this anymore.

“I’m in love with you,” she says again, and the words are crumbling, but then again, so is she.

When he smiles, it’s not with half of his mouth, the kind of smirk he always gives, like he’s afraid if he shows his joy for than a moment, it’ll be taken away from him. It’s something she’s never seen before, changes his entire face to make it look more boyish, more like a teenager instead of whatever façade he’s been putting up for years, and he leans towards her. Hand on her jaw, he kisses her, tasting of orange juice and bad vodka and everything she’s been getting familiar with for the last three months.

“You’re a mess,” he says, once he’s pulled back and breathing heavily. He lifts a hand to brush a lock of her hair behind her ear.

She’s not going to pressure him to say _I love you_ back, because that’s what Dean did to her and, no matter how many times she tried to let that go, there’s that part of her that’s always going to resent that. That’s not fair on _Jess_, not at all, not when she knows he has issues too. Not her ones, where she’s too scared of fucking things up all the time, but his own because he had a deadbeat mom and no one he’s really said those words to –

“I’m in love with you,” he says, and she can breathe.

“I made us waste so much time,” she says, burying her face into his shoulder, trying to stop the spinning of her head.

“Nah,” he says, and she feels him press a kiss against her hair. “We’d have been a disaster if we did this three months ago.”

“I’m going to be focusing on school again once this summer’s up,” she warns him.

He laughs. “Guess we’ll figure this boyfriend/girlfriend thing together.”

* * *

“Why is Rory holding Jess’ hand?” Luke demands, eyes trained on the couple by the counter, as soon as Lorelai walks through the door.

“Don’t ask me questions in the _morning_,” she says instead, but moves towards the counter, Luke trailing in her wake. “They’re not dating, but they’re seeing each other.”

“Who’s not dating?” Rory chimes in, letting her mother take a sip from her coffee as Luke moves behind the counter to pour another cup.

“You and Lover Boy over here,” Lorelai says, flicking a finger in Jess’ direction. He salutes at her.

“Oh, no, we’re dating now,” Rory says, leaning back against her boyfriend.

Luke drops the cup of coffee he’s about to pass over to Lorelai, who spits out the sip she’s taken.

“_What_?”

“Oops. See, I’ve gotten so used to not telling people about this, I forgot to actually tell them,” Rory says to Jess, who shrugs.

“Since _when_?” Luke says, head going back and forth between the two.

“All summer?” Of course it’s the first thing Jess contributes to this conversation. He’s looking far too amused at his uncle’s reaction.

“_All_ summer?”


End file.
